In(sis)tent --
con(sis)tent --
ex(sis)tent --

And what is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life -- not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but ( Read more... )

If the doors of perception were cleansed ( Read more... )

A brief note on salvia, for friends of the virgin mother.

( messages from mazatec shamanism )

"We love music
because it resembles
the sphere-sounds
of union.
We have been
part of an oceanic
harmony before,
so these moments of
treble and bass
keep our remembering
fresh."

--Rumi

"After having studied
philosophy,
I wanted to see
what madness was:
I had been mad enough
to study reason;
I was reasonable enough
to study madness."

-- Foucault

...interesting points about Foucault's argument that modernity has excluded madness from "normal" society by considering it to be the negation of the rationality that constitutes society. First: Foucault's own post-modern discourse imposes the same rationalization onto madness as does Cartesian discourse -- they both attempt to write ( Read more... )

...and "substance addiction" is the name for the Western anima complex, the suppression and repression of the unconscious. Moreover, process is still a substance, still something represented ( Read more... )

A lot of Americans (or modern Westerners in general) have trouble experiencing ecstasy, trance, anatman, ego-death, or what Maslow called "peak experiences." This is simply due to the fact that Americans are hung up on some reified sense of self, some sense of self as an autonomous substance that inherently exists. I've said before that you can ( Read more... )

The self is the relation that relates itself to itself, opening up the division between a mind and a body, between concepts and percepts, between I and not-I. (cf. Leibniz, Hegel, and Kierkegaard ( Read more... )